Users spend increasing amounts of time online shopping, planning, reading and otherwise looking for content that interests them. The vast majority of content may be of little interest to many users, yet users review volumes of available information to find content of interest to them. Personalization of content available to users may be based on affirmative actions by users that elect to provide such information. However, many users forego the benefits of personalization in light of the associated time and trouble inherent to setting up accounts and/or taking the affirmative actions required to generate more personalized content.
Travel planning is one area where users seek relevant content. Travel planning web sites often include reviews of potential products such as, flights, hotels, dining services, and auto rentals. Certain travel planning web sites also provide reviews typically generated by consumers who have used the product or service being viewed. For a number of reasons, the reviews may not always be reflective of the average experience with the product or service. One reason is that people are most likely to only post reviews in response to more extreme experiences, such as excellent or poor experiences. The average consumer is less likely to post a review than an infuriated or thrilled consumer. Furthermore, existing reviews may cause reviewers to modify their own review, and thereby introduce social influence bias. In some instances, reviews may also be edited or deleted by a review service provider for various reasons. Such modifications may introduce the point of view of a biased third party to a review. Vendors may even post skewed reviews under the guise of a consumer to improve their perceived value. As such, recommendations based on these reviews may not be accurate.
An unbiased, empirical assessment of goods or services may prove difficult for all of the foregoing reasons. Even if the reviews were reliable and unbiased, a particular user may not agree with the reviews when they try the product for themselves. In other words, every consumer is different and the reviews shared are subjective in nature. However, those differences remain difficult to identify on a person-to-person basis.
Instead of reviews, many travel planning services rely on paid advertisement space and generalizations to rank and recommend products for users. However, the travel planning service may seem impersonal and inconvenient to a user based in part on a lack of personal insight. The user may need to engage in the time-consuming process of sifting through voluminous, phonebook-like offerings for products and services associated with their trip in order to locate the ones they want.